Having a custom ring tone on the phone you own has moved from something special to a fashion kind of development. Everybody has his phone singing the song that he heard this morning or an 80s hit or just some song that is special to the mobile phone owner.

How can I change my ring tone?

Every company has a system of it's own so it depends a lot on what phone you have. With Ericsson, for example, you can use a web based ring tone composer and design the ring tones that you can then manually input in your phone. You can also find already designed ring tones on the web that you can download or input into the phone.

Only a few Nokia phones have a ring tone composer, if your phone doesn't have a ring tone composer but supports customizable ring tones then the only way to use them on your phone is to connect the phone to your computer through a data cable or a "Smart Message" can be sent, containing the ring tone.

With new phones, ring tones can also be sent from phone to phone or from computer to phone through other data connections such as bluetooth or infrared, making the ring tone transfer and other transfers a lot easier.

How can ring tones be uploaded directly to the phone?

Most phones will not allow a direct input of the ring tone on the phone so if you don't want to use one of the services that are available online, sending the ring tones through Smart Messages, you can transfer them from the computer.

The first step is the connection environment that you'll use to connect the phone and the computer. One possibility is the infrared connection, or Irda, if your computer has and Irda device and your phone has it too. If no such connection is available then a connection through a data cable is your other option, a data cable can be purchased at specialized stores.

Once the connection between the devices is established you will need a specialized software. Such software can be bought but you can also find shareware software that you can download.

Now you know how you can change the ring tone your phone uses. Remember that if your phone has bluetooth or Irda you can just connect to friends that have phones with the same connection possibilities for an easier transfer.